politic

Some of my best friends are Taureans. They can be warm and friendly people, who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Yet of all the twelve signs, they arguably have the greatest capacity for causing misery.

To understand why Taurus might be the nastiest signs of the Zodiac, one has to think about its basic attributes. Taureans are often very focused, and once they decide on a course of action, they can be almost impossible to stop. At the same time, their brains can be one-tracked – they get an idea into their heads, and they then pursue it until the very end, ignoring or even destroying alternative viewpoints.

This means that Taureans have a tendency to regard the ends as justifying the means. They think about what they want to achieve, and they regard their goal as being absolute, and they’ll do whatever’s necessary to accomplish it.

An example of a Taurean who has quite recently been in the news is Bernard Madoff, the American stock broker who defrauded his clients out of billions of dollars. His fraud took place over many years, and once it started, it was apparently unstoppable. This is so typically Taurean – they move in a particular direction, and having gathered momentum, they can’t apply the brakes.

Bernard Madoff had personal contact with many of his clients, and he was able to reassure them that their money was safe with him. This is of course a very nasty way to treat people, but if you’re a Taurus the ends often justify the means.

Moving from finance to terrorism, we notice that Timothy McVeigh was a Taurus. In the mid-1990s he got upset about the way the American government was supposedly interfering in people’s lives, and as a result he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

So Timothy McVeigh got an idea into his head, and pursued a plan of action with ruthless efficiency, not caring about the human cost of what he was doing.

When you move from terrorism to politics, Taurus gets even scarier, and we find that some of the world’s most infamous dictators had Taurus as their star sign.

Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq, was probably a Taurean. As we know, he was someone who was very brutal. He had no hesitation about executing his enemies and critics, and if a community defied him, he was prepared to destroy it. An example was the use of nerve gas again the the town of Halabja, which killed around 5000 people.

In the case of Saddam Hussein, we see another of Taurus’ less pleasant features – vindictiveness. Taureans don’t like it when people cross them, and acts of rebellion or defiance are neither forgotten nor forgiven.

Whatever Saddam Hussein’s crimes, he was outdone by Pol Pot, the Cambodian leader. Pol Pot was motivated by a powerful ideology – it was an extreme form of Maoist communism, which vilified urban lifestyle. Cities were emptied, and the regime’s enemies, real or imagined, were executed in their droves. In fact up to two million people were killed by Pol Pot’s government. This was a clear example of ideology being everything – an ideology that destroyed a whole country.

Then there’s the most infamous Taurus of them all, Adolf Hitler. He had an idea, and he followed it to the letter, quite literally. If you read Mein Kampf, which he wrote while serving a prison sentence, years before he came to power, you can immediately understand his view of the world. It never changed, and he pursued his objectives to the bitter end.

One thing that is interesting about Adolf Hitler is that he had very few vices. He didn’t drink, he detested smoking and to a great extent he was a vegetarian. This puritanism is actually quite common amongst Taurean dictators.

English dictator Oliver Cromwell, who was in power in the mid-Seventeenth Century, was a religious Puritan, with a capital ‘P’. He made the life of his subjects a misery, and activities such as sport, dancing and the celebration of Christmas were restricted or banned.

Another puritanical Taurean was Maximilien Robespierre, who was the man in charge during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He was someone who had strict morals, who was regarded as being completely incorruptible. Yet he believed that the only way to safeguard the revolution was to guillotine hundred of people, including some of the very people who had created the Revolution in the first place.

Another incorruptible and very moral Taurean was the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. He meant well, but a lot of people died because of his actions.

Now, I should emphasise that I am not saying that all Taureans are nasty. However if they’ve got strong political beliefs, and they’ve apparently got no vices, they should probably be avoided.